Ming Tien Ashita Tomorrow
by Yui Miyamoto
Summary: What happens when Takaba's sarcastic words become real?


**fandom - Viewfinder**  
 **title - Ming Tien. Ashita. Tomorrow.**  
 **rating - pg**  
 **pairing - asami + takaba**  
 **description - What happens when Takaba's sarcastic words become real?**

 **Disclaimer - Viewfinder doesn't belong to me.**

 **Ming tien. Ashita. Tomorrow.**  
 **By miyamoto yui**

 ** _/A forbidden lover in the depths./_**

He says the line to himself just to laugh at it with his calm, elegant vocal chords, "A forbidden lover in the depths." It rolls off too smoothly and he ends up patting the tie of his dark suit just to overshadow his uncomfortability with the entire phrase.

In the depths of what, he wonders.  
Despair isn't for the proud and hunger isn't for the needy. Putting an exact word to obsession is as idiotic as lighting a fire in the rain. It's like seeing someone's tortured face, bruised and bloodied, being wiped away by tears.

Utterly meaningless. That's what it all comes down to.

In a café, putting his book down casually and pushing it down with his fingertips, they linger on the cover a few seconds longer as he rubs on the velvet surface. Reaching into his jacket pocket, he pulls out a silver lighter and pushes out a cigarette from a box before placing it back into the same pocket. Covering the small flame with one cupped palm, he lights his cigarette.  
He crosses his legs, leans back, and looks outside onto the street. The window he's next to is wide open and the crisp air brushes against his cheeks with the rain falling in cycles between soft and hard like orchestra cymbals going in a steady beat with only the conductor knowing how it will flow throughout the concert. The audience never knows what to expect.

The person he's going to meet is late. How wonderful.  
What a perfect excuse: Rain. Life gets in the way again. Oh, how he dislikes rain.

It's messy. Once it drenches you, you're likely to get sick if you don't warm yourself up. But even if you do find shelter, does that guarantee that you won't catch a cold anyway?  
Yes, there is no way to ever prepare for the rain.

 _/"Kneel in the rain with your suit on," his father said as his mother tugged on his father's sleeve. Those eyes deathly glared at him.  
"He will get sick!" she harshly scolded his father, but he shrugged her off._

The little boy, because he spoke up in the funerat, knelt on the mud and faced the koi pond while the Earth acted as if it were going through another flood of punishment. He just blinked his eyes and clenched his fists.

He was a child that didn't know how to cry. Stoic and unfazed, the pandemonium of the world didn't even make a dent in his stern expression.

And the tears that rubbed and splattered against his face replaced the emotion he couldn't express. After all, his grandfather had told him, 'No one should be able to see you at your lowest point. Not even yourself.'  
His grandfather died and he had to truly accept it today.

He was the only person that brought him out of the city to places where he could pretend that his name didn't mean anything. He was the only person who went out to save him when the tides were too high at their favorite beach.

That's why he spoke up to his father that day. 'Tomorrow, everyone will forget.'  
He couldn't remember what his father said before punching him.

The bruise on his cheek stung./

There is no way to plan for too much sunshine either. You suspect when everything goes right too…

He taps the ashtray as his eyes follow a familiar frame running by, only ten feet away from him. He watches the camera flashes as the boy hollers for the object of his viewfinder's affection to come back. A smirk encompasses the boy's satisfied face as he comes to a complete halt.  
"Gotcha."

The rain falls, but he tugs on the rim of his cap with a smug confidence at the retreating, hazy shadow. But in a millisecond, he takes out a towel from his waterproof camera case and wipes his beloved gently before quickly, yet delicately putting it back into the bag.  
Unfortunately, he's not waterproof.

Because of the sudden rain, his wet t-shirt shows his nipples and his jeans cling to his calves and thighs. He sneezes while looking from side to side on what to do next. "Develop or change? Dumb question."  
His priorities are fucked up and he knows it too. He can't wait to develop the film.

The man in the business suit eyes the gray dot in the distance. "Poor pathetic sap. Can't even relay a message. There goes my appointment, but…"  
He takes up his warm cup of double cappuccino and licks his lips. He leaves some bills without looking and gets up from the table. After pushing half a stick of the second cigarette into the astray, he heads to the boy who's about to take a step towards his workplace, or rather, the home that means more than the apartment he currently lives in (if he can ever move out from that man's sight).

He walks behind the boy and slides his icy fingers up the nape of the boy's wet neck. "You've violated two rules."

Flinching, the boy doesn't even turn around. The touch or the voice would have given it all away, but a double attack makes his blood boil. It becomes four times as bad when his anger and frustration start to clash upon one another.  
"You make up the rules for me to break them," the boy replies tartly. "Sometimes, I don't do it purposely, can you believe it?"  
The boy laughs, but he wants to get away. And now.

The rain pounds on the pavement a little bit harder, clanging against his ears with invisible needles.

The man ignores the retort. "You're not supposed to interfere with my business and you're not supposed to show anyone your body. Even by accident, _Takaba_."  
The boy steps forward and shakes his head as the chill of that last comment runs through his body. He hates how honest his body is.

He likes the way he says his name. His nipples harden at the thought.

Clutching onto the strap of his bag, Takaba tries to inch away, but his dark chuckle outwardly brushes off the exciting, yet terrifying sensation bubbling inside of him. "So, what do you plan to do? Keep me locked away, Asami?"

At that moment, he turns around and his shaking hand clutches onto the soggy collar. The collar's owner looks down at him with devilish eyes. "Just because you hold everyone down like dogs with one word, it doesn't mean I'll come. Just because you get jealous at everyone who eyes me for one reason or another, it doesn't mean you have the right to. Just because I'm just an 'ordinary and poor' individual, it doesn't mean you have the right to look down on me!"  
He pushes the man away with one hand.

"So why…" the boy looks at the ground and then up into his eyes again. "Why do you tell me I'm nothing and then treat me like something?"  
Holding his chin up, he gulps. His eyes look blankly at him. "Only, you throw me back out all over again?"

Takaba is at a loss at his own words, the ones he swore never to tell even if he had to bite his tongue to keep his pride. But looking at Asami who shows him no emotion whatsoever tells him nothing and everything at the same time.  
Logic works. It shouldn't work either. What the hell is the answer from someone who doesn't speak and from the other person who won't say what's the real question?

Asami stands there as Takaba turns around. The gel on his head is erased. His hair falls down in straight strands, dripping with the sky's tears. His eyes don't make an impression on Takaba's back.

Those unbending eyes, the ones that rebel in playfulness and hate, they hurt and entice him at the same time. Their eyes are the same.  
Takaba's and that little boy he met a long time ago…

"Ming tien," he tells himself.

 _/It was the first Chinese word he learned, but it was useless in Hong Kong because it wasn't in Cantonese. Pretending to not know anything about his family, the little boy accidentally dropped the apple he bought in front of the market place, a dirty place where he wasn't supposed to go to because that was where 'normal people' went to.  
The little boy picked himself up and cried a little while picking up the red apple from the dirty ground saying, "Ming tien."  
It was to throw people off._

When he bent his knees to dust off the apple with his hands, the little looked up at him. Without thinking, he wiped the boy's tears with his sleeve. The little boy cracked a little smile and clung onto that damp sleeve before he ran away.  
Later, someone whispered to the teenager what the little boy had said.

And in his first trip to Hong Kong with his father, when he ran away to explore, he met that beautiful-eyed Fei…/

Their eyes…were the same…

Takaba stops and listens.  
"Ashita," Asami says with a little ring to his tone.

 _Tomorrow_. Takaba doesn't know if he should trust the translation given to him. Not in that tone, especially. Nothing ever makes any fucking sense.  
Not with him.

Wanting, waiting, and warning knowing it is hopeless, useless, and worthless.

"I hate you."  
When the boy holds his camera bag preciously between his arms, he runs and his blurry eyes won't tell him if he's going in the wrong direction. But he knows he already is, no matter where he goes, ever since their paths crossed.

The man knows. The boy half means what he just said to him.

The more they come closer, the more they should tear each other apart.

It is then that he truly understands what death means. The end of everything.

He takes a deep breath and he remembers the words of his grandfather as they pound mercilessly into his numbing ears. The rain hits his face, making traces of tear marks and embedding them without trying.  
Somehow, they fall into the hollowness of his nearly fictional heart.

"You're the only one who makes me take tomorrow for granted. That's why, you stupid boy."  
Before he knows it, as the people curiously look at him, he's finally lost his mind. The vibrating phone blinks as he takes it out of another pocket. Clenching it tightly, he throws it to the ground and it smashes into a hundred pieces.  
He sheds his business jacket so that he can run faster after him.

He won't shout, but he'll chase the boy as far as he can go.

So, as the sky darkens, he wraps his arms around the boy when he finally catches up to him. He buries his head into his shoulder, kissing the blade with his blue lips. The rain washes their bodies colder.  
The camera bag falls to the ground, but even though the boy reaches out. The man strongly holds the boy's arms back to cross against his see-through shirt against his skin.

The boy continues to struggle and thrash about violently. He eyes his bag on the ground through the warm tears falling. He shouts but the man doesn't hear or feel anything except the rain and the warmth within his arms.

Tomorrow isn't close enough anymore.  
After all, nothing meant anything until he let go of everything to touch this person now.

Ironically, he remembers the book he left on the café table:

 ** _/A forbidden lover at the deepest depths of the violent ocean,  
losing all light at the surface,  
swallowing you whole,  
raping you into loneliness._**

 **But you aren't alone. That's all that counts**  
 **as your skin is peeled**  
 **little by little**  
 **by human fingernails,**

 **the same beings you despised**  
 **for being so weak and vulnerable…**

 **until you find out**  
 **that this is the result of unadulterated passion,**

 **what you wanted most of all**  
 **with a scar over your throat,**  
 **cut-off vocal chords./**

"Takaba." He only says it once, but it means everything.  
Authority and longing and inhuman desperation into one word for him.

His self-imposed safe word.  
The one starting to break its own chains…

 _Whatever you do, I don't want you to forget me. For whatever reason._  
Asami holds him closer.

The boy's fists are so tight that his fingertips crack his palms open to let out drops of blood. It mixes into the rain…  
Splatter, splatter…

He doesn't want this kind of power.  
The boy cries at the oni he's made into a mere mortal.

 ** _/With yesterday becoming ancient, the present is now the near past. And for better or for worse,  
_** _tomorrow slowly crumbles._

Yet, it still comes.

We are falling faster and faster…/

 **Owari./The End.  
**

 **-**  
 **Author's note -** It's been an awfully long time since I've written a fic and especially for this particular fandom. Life got in the way, you know how it goes. * shakes head and gives a melancholic smile *  
Well, for this particular fic, I wanted to aim (besides procrastinating) towards an Asami who removes his devil mask to become human for Takaba. I don't know how to describe it exactly, but it was the feeling I wanted to capture.  
(Damn, I'm rusty after a month. *sighs*)

Always,  
Yui

Friday, November 11, 2005  
1:17:30 AM


End file.
